In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 [electronic resource].

Hatje Cantz 2012

Open access content

In the year 1974, the United States of America was in crisis. We had lost an ill-conceived and disastrously mismanaged war in Vietnam and were about to withdraw in defeat. Following the Yom Kippur War, the Arab oil-producing states initiated an embargo on oil shipments to the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan, in retaliation for their support of Israel, and this triggered an energy crisis in most of the industrialized world. Economic growth in the U.S. slowed to near zero. In August of 1974, Richard Nixon would become the first U.S. president to resign in disgrace, and his successor Gerald Ford promptly pardoned him of all crimes committed while in office. This is the time Joseph Beuys chose to make his first visit to the United States. Since 1970, he had been increasingly extending his theories of sculpture into the social realm, calling this new work “Social Sculpture.” Rather than mounting a conventional exhibition in the U.S., he decided instead to arrange a series of lectures and discussions—in New York, Chicago, and Minneapolis—under the collective title “Energy Plan for the Western Man.” He arrived in New York from Düsseldorf on January 9, 1974. When he flew back into New York from Minneapolis on January 19, he performed a therapeutic operation on a striking new feature of the New York City skyline. The World Trade Center had been completed only months before Beuys’ arrival in New York. It was the world’s largest commercial complex, including seven buildings and a shopping concourse, built at a cost of $750 million. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki and Emery Roth, it was capped off with two 110-story skyscrapers, the Twin Towers, which dwarfed every other building in New York (including the Empire State Building) and rose up out of Lower Manhattan like severed legs. The towers immediately stood for (symbolized) globalized capital and American dominance in the world market; they were the symbolic pillars of the New World Order…
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Art and history
Capital movements
Culture and globalization
Terrorism

Text

David Levi Strauss
Joseph Beuys
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
Chus Martínez
Bettina Funcke
Katrin Sauerländer
Cordelia Marten
Melissa Larner
Stefanie Drobnik
Sam Frank
Rea Triyandafilidis
Gerrit Jackson
Frauke Schnoor
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